Large, prominent trees are inhabited by spirits. Many trees in the equatorial West African forest throw out from their trunks, at from ten to sixteen feet from the ground, solid buttresses continuous with the body of the tree itself, only a few inches in thickness, but in width at the base of the tree from four to six feet. These buttresses are projected toward several opposite points of the compass, as if to resist the force of sudden wind-storms. They are a noticeable forest feature and are commonly seen in the silk-cotton trees. The recesses between them are actually used as lairs by small wild animals. They are supposedly also a favorite home of the spirits. Caverns and large rocks have their special spirit inhabitants. At Gabun, and also on Corisco Island, geological breaks in the horizontal strata of rock were filled by narrow vertical strata of limestone, between which water action has worn away the softer rock, leaving the limestone walls isolated, with a narrow ravine between them. These ravines were formerly reverenced as the abodes of spirits. When I made a tour in 1882, surveying for a second Ogowe Station, I came some seventy miles up river from my well-established first station, Kângwe, at Lambarene, to an enormous rock, a granite boulder, lying in the bed of the river. The adjacent hillsides on either bank of the river were almost impassable, being covered with boulders of all sizes, and a heavy forest growing in among and even on them. This great rock had evidently in the long past become detached by torrential streams that scored the mountainside in the heavy rainy season and had plunged to its present position. The swift river current swirled and dashed against the huge obstruction to navigation, making the ascent of the river at that point particularly difficult. Superstition suggested that the spirits of the rock did not wish boats or canoes to pass their abode. Nevertheless, necessities of trade compelled; and crews in passing made an ejaculatory prayer, or doffed their head coverings, in respect, but with the fear that the "ascent" in that part of the journey might be for "woe," whence they called the rock "Itala-ja-maguga," which, contracted to "Talaguga," I gave as a name to my new station, erected in 1882 in the vicinity of the rock. During my eight subsequent years at the station I did, indeed, meet with some "woe," but also much weal. And the missionary work of Talaguga, carried on since 1892 by the hands of the Société Évangelique de Paris, has met with signal success.